Hometown: Paradise, CA

Year: First-Year

College: Benjamin Franklin

Major: Mechanical Engineering

Extracurriculars: Yale Students for Christ; Benjamin Franklin IM Volleyball Captain

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“I never expected to feel so welcomed at Yale,” says Serena Riddle. “But when I went to the first meeting for Yale Students for Christ, I felt like I had an immediate family.” Even in that original encounter, Serena remembers feeling refreshed by the honesty and vulnerability she felt from people she barely knew; it was, she said, a reassurance that she’d made the right college choice. The group’s weekly Bible study and discussion gave Serena her closest friends during her first year and made her feel at home.

In some ways, the challenge of being openly religious in a largely agnostic space is a familiar one for Serena, who grew up in Paradise, California. Admitting to her atheist mother that she believes in God was her “most formative experience,” she says. “It challenged me a lot, telling my mom something I knew she’d be disappointed with,” Serena adds. “But it showed me that I was choosing my own path and that I had the strength to do so.”

And Yale has challenged Serena in ways apart from her faith. Facing deadline after academic deadline in her first semester, Serena remembers wishing she could get sick to be able to step back and relax for a while. It was a revelation, she says, to realize she could take control of her life again without coming down with the flu.

To Serena, being a part of Benjamin Franklin College’s inaugural class has been an extraordinary experience. One of Yale’s two new residential colleges, Benjamin Franklin College—along with Pauli Murray College—opened in 2017. The separation from Yale’s Old Campus—by a seemingly vast half-mile—serves as a kind of bond for Franklin first-years, and the college itself has organized other group-building activities. For instance, Serena recalls, Franklin students were encouraged to put their own imprint on the building by painting the walls of the freshly constructed basement. Serena was inspired by her roommate’s mural in the basement and will be painting her own this year. “I’m not going to be here when the [newly planted] trees are big enough to have swings on them,” she says. “It’s crazy to think that things we do could be passed down for hundreds of years.”

Serena describes her upbringing as modest. She went to a public high school that other nearby schools termed “Hickville” due to its remote location. But a collection of idealistic teachers helped foster Serena’s desire to do something that would affect more than just her immediate vicinity—in her own words, to “make the world better for a few thousand people.”

Ultimately, she chose Yale because she felt that other Yalies had the same hope. Serena recalls feeling, during her visit to Yale in her senior year, that everyone she met was someone she wanted to be friends with, someone who was genuine and working toward their own dreams. “I remember thinking, ‘I didn’t even know people could have personalities like this,’” she says.

Serena’s essays include her Common App personal statement.

ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):

Personal Statement

The way fear pulsed through my chest and sent sweat pouring out of my palms would have suggested I was being held at gunpoint or standing in front of an executioner deciding my fate.

But I wasn’t. I was standing before my mom, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known, who has praised nearly every step I have taken on this Earth. As she reclined in the small red living room of our duplex bathed in dying evening light, the words she spoke were muffled by thoughts running riotously through my mind. In every pause in our conversation I struggled to force the words past the rock that had manifested in my chest and was weighing down my courage—”I believe in God.” Four words. That’s all. But they would rupture my mother’s belief that I still held the atheism we had shared as long as I’d had the thoughts to agree with her and the words to criticize the ignorance of those with faith.

Before my parents’ separation when I was in fifth grade, my M.O. was to shut down anyone who promoted an idea as “unscientific” as God, and that pride kept me from understanding the perspectives I opposed. When I decided to hear the opinions of others and search out my beliefs for myself, I found myself questioning what I had been taught my entire life.

When I finally forced the words out, they slid past my lips so smoothly that I wondered what had been holding them back for so long. When they reached her ears, her eyes fell, her voice dropped, her disappointment hit me like a boulder. Did it hurt? Yes. Was I shunned for a while? Oh yeah. Breaking free from expectations that had roped me in for years was bound to get a reaction. Did all of this cripple me and send me further into isolation?

Absolutely not.

Though my mom may not have been able to see it yet, revealing my own free-thinking was worth the week of awkward silence that followed. My secrecy tainted our relationship with an unseen barrier. This raw, open honesty mixed with the empathy I’d learned to truly put into practice allowed me to forge genuine connections with my family, and later my peers, despite the inevitable and innumerable differences we had.

Embracing my individual thoughts was crucial to becoming who I am today. In the years following the divorce I’d been tossed between the vastly different worlds of my mom and dad. I rode a ship in an ever-reversing current between two lands with different rules, different beliefs, and different expectations, seasick from the weekly custody exchange. But this continual state of adaptation was the life I had grown accustomed to, and I had chosen to change it all. The words I spoke that evening didn’t just declare my faith, they laid down bricks in the foundation for what would be my world, built of my own beliefs, my choices, my passions. For someone like me who had always been a people-pleaser who avoided all decision-making like the plague, this could not be more life-changing, or terrifying. But it was also the door into freedom that I hadn’t imagined possible.

My situation was unbearably lonely and chaotic at times, but it forced me to build my own world. With my feet on solid ground of my own choosing I gained control of where I stepped next. I chose to question what people told me and to search relentlessly for answers, even if those answers challenged the ideas I had pridefully upheld for years. I learned how to open myself up to challenges and take unconventional paths that defied the expectations of those around me. And now I am free to blaze trails in uncharted territory where much greater opportunities await. I will never stop questioning, nor will I ever stop growing.

From 50 Yale Admission Success Stories: And the Essay That Made Them Happen, edited by the Yale Daily News Staff. Copyright © 2020 by the authors
and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group.